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Everyone huddled behind Ben as he sat at his makeshift desk and moved video files around on the desktop of his computer. Several different video feeds played simultaneously in separate windows on the monitors, each coming from the stationary and helmet cameras around the room.
Kyle waved a hand in front of his face and smiled when he saw the motion replayed in one of the windows. Bryan unhooked the strap holding the camera to his head and tossed it on the table – Kyle did the same, rubbing at the red skin on his forehead. Ben moved two of the videos side by side and dragged the progress bars to the same position for each.
“OK, everything is synched up. The video on the left is from Bryan and the right is from Kyle. The audio you’ll hear is from Bryan’s camera.” He started both videos by pressing the Enter key and everything went into motion.
Bryan moved closer, watching intently as the events of the previous few minutes replayed. The video wobbled wildly as they climbed into the hidden library and took several steps into the room. When the cameras centered on the desk he could clearly see a man crouching behind the chair.
His body was covered in black, and shrouded in shadows from the candles on the table above him. Details around his head were sparse as the cameras struggled with the lowlight environment.
Ben’s voice, yelling from the chapel, came through the speakers by the monitors. He had been right – someone was there, hiding in the shadows the entire time and they couldn’t see him. Their argument played out with Travis making a brief appearance in the back of the room. The light from Kyle’s phone cut through some of darkness, but failed to illuminate the man.
“Incredible,” Katie said. “You honestly couldn’t see this?”
“I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Bryan said, his eyes never leaving the monitor.
The man slowly rose from behind the chair, standing in front of the desk. The light from the candles hit his body, yet no shadow fell across the floor beside him. The details of his black clothing were noticeably absent, appearing to be one solid piece that covered every inch of his body.
His arms hung by his sides, stretching unnaturally down to his knees, disappearing in the darkness behind the chair. The shoulders and head appeared fused, with no neck connecting them.
As Ben’s excited voice chronicled his movement, the man slowly turned around. The only features on his face were large, yellowed teeth sticking out in stark contrast to the surrounding darkness. The light from Kyle’s phone and the nearby candles seemed to be swallowed, as if by a void, where the man stood.
“What the shit?” Travis asked.
“That's no man,” Joey said under his breath.
The teeth spread silently as Ben continued yelling in the background. A black hand brushed against the chair, moving it several inches. The cameras jiggled as Bryan and Kyle stepped backward, startled at the movement.
Its teeth opened wider than any human mouth could and the creature sprang forward, throwing the chair to the side as it did. The video feeds became incomprehensible as they turned and ran across the room, diving through the wall.
Ben punched at the keyboard and stopped the videos. No one spoke for several seconds as they contemplated what they’d seen.
“Jackpot!” Ben spun in his chair, his face alight.
Bryan rubbed his temples, trying to understand what was going on.
“You couldn't see that... thing when it stood right in front of you?” Joey asked. “But the video picked it up?”
“The only thing we saw was the chair move,” Kyle said. His normally healthy looking skin had gone completely pale. He kept wiping beaded sweat from his forehead.
“Ben, make copies of that and keep them safe,” Joey said.
“Already did – in triplicate.”
Travis and Joey erupted in celebration, repeatedly high-fiving each other. Joey started performing a horrible dance that resembled a jig, shuffling his feet along the stone floor. “We're rich!”
Ben spun around in circles in his chair, throwing his arms in the air. “Nobel Prize, here we come!”
Bryan stepped backward and leaned against the wall, his eyes still staring at the monitor.
“I hate to be a party pooper, especially when you're embarrassing yourselves so thoroughly, but aren't we going to talk about what we just watched? What the hell was that thing?” he asked.
Katie stood in silence, her left hand rubbing her neck as she looked at the floor.
“You should be dancing too,” Travis said. “You two numb nuts just recorded the best footage ever taken of a ghost. You might get a nice chunk of coin out of this too!”
The color had slowly returned to Kyle's skin, and he seemed back in the moment, his eyes settling on Bryan’s. “He’s right dude. We're going to be famous!”
While Bryan could understand why everyone wanted to celebrate, he couldn't join in. His mind already raced at the implications of what had happened.
His entire belief system teetered on the brink, threatening to topple over. If ghosts were real, what other paranormal claims could be true? What about religion: Heaven, Hell, demons, angels, God? All of his known limitations of the universe seemed to be shattered by this one occurrence.
For years he'd brushed off everything that didn't have tangible evidence as to its existence. He had completely written off the possibility of ever being presented with any truthful claim of the supernatural. Now some form of life after death had just reared its head in his presence, and he didn't know how to take it. Or was that evidence of something other than the afterlife?
“Again, not to piss in anyone's cornflakes, but what exactly did we just see?”
Everyone stopped dancing around and gave him dumbfounded looks.
“A ghost, dumb ass,” Travis said. “What is your problem?”
“OK, so what is a ghost? A few hours ago you two were laughing at Kyle for believing in the paranormal. Now you're looking at me like I'm crazy for wanting an explanation.”
“Obviously that was the spirit of someone who died in the church, probably at the hands of Charles Danver,” Kyle said.
“It had the teeth of a great white, no eyes, horribly long arms, and couldn’t be seen by the human eye. If that was the spirit of a dead man, what the hell was wrong with him? Why could the camera see it, but we weren’t able to? Did he come from Hell?”
Bryan shook his head at the confused looks everyone gave him. How could they not see the implications of what they had just recorded?
“Goddamn it! Stop counting your future money and think! If that’s a ghost, that means some form of afterlife is real. Does that mean there is a heaven and a hell? Does that validate the Bible? I just said ‘goddamn’, did I just piss off God?” Bryan’s words came faster and faster, his mind reeling as it tried to keep up.
Kyle put his hands up and slowly lowered them in an easing gesture. “Dude, breathe... just calm down.”
But Bryan couldn’t – thoughts from all angles continued pouring through his head. “I can’t goddamn it! I’m an atheist and I just watched a spirit, or whatever it was, kick over a chair and come at us. Everything I’ve held as the truth is now up for debate.” He walked around the workstation and started pacing back and forth in front of it.
“The sound I heard earlier – was that the same thing in the video, or something else? And again, why can’t we see anything, but video picks them up?”
“Maybe they exist on some kind of frequency we can’t see or hear.” Ben’s arms were still above his head in celebration, but the elation had begun to slide from his face.
Bryan stopped pacing and looked over at him. “You just made that up, didn’t you?”
Ben shrugged.
“And what about this goddamn stench? Why does it smell so bad in here that it’s actually hard to breathe? And am I the only one that smells salt water now? What the hell is that about? We’re in the middle of the mountains, and I can smell the ocean?”
Now that Bryan had questioned his use of the Lord’s name in vain, he couldn’t stop it from flying out. In fact, he couldn’t keep much of anything from coming out of his mouth at this point. He felt like the walls were closing in on him.
“I can smell salt water too. It was strongest around the altar earlier, but now I can smell it over here,” Kyle said. “Do ghosts smell like sea water?”
Travis sniffed at the air. “I can’t really smell anything, but I did a lot of blow in the eighties, so my sense of smell is pretty hosed.”
“There is a ton of weird shit going on around here, but what does it all add up to?” Bryan asked.
“Oh!” Kyle snapped his fingers and looked at Bryan. “The plants and trees around the church are all dead – almost like something can’t live too close to it.”
“Exactly!” Bryan felt an enormous amount of relief that at least his friend had begun to pick up on some of the weirdness around them, even if he couldn’t quite see why he was so concerned.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Bryan said, turning on Katie. “You’re the only one of us here who seems to know anything about this stuff, yet you’re standing there and saying nothing.”
The prior tidbits of information she’d shared throughout the night started to form a larger whole for him then. Her insistence that Danver could be innocent, her knowledge of the hidden library, and lack of reaction to the oddities of the night, all began to add up for him.
“Clearly you’re obsessed with this place, so you tell us, what the hell is going on? What’s with the smell and the dead trees?” Bryan asked.
“I can understand why you expect me to have answers, but all I can provide is conjecture like the rest of you,” she said.
“Then conject,” he said coolly.
“Perhaps the smell is a side effect of the land here being ‘thin’.” She continued to look at the floor and rub her neck as she spoke. “Maybe these creatures can only crossover on this particular day, but lesser things, such as an odor, are always lingering between our world and theirs. I just want to reiterate that I don’t know. All of the detailed accounts of this are in that room over there.” She pointed toward the hidden library without looking up. “Books that I have only had access to for the past few hours. Danver hid them here for a reason, and it’s most likely so that people like me couldn’t find the answers to the questions you’re asking.”
“Why not just destroy them then?” Kyle asked.
“Perhaps he wanted to keep them away from others, but still have access to them himself,” she said with a shrug. “You’re still asking me questions I can’t answer.”
Bryan watched everyone as they went back and forth. Kyle seemed concerned with the questions Bryan wanted answered, but the rest of them, outside of Katie, didn’t appear to be worried at all. They had their little video that would make them filthy rich, and nothing else was important to them.
He still didn’t understand Katie’s role in all of this. The fact that she had become obsessed with seeking knowledge regarding the whole ‘thin’ issue seemed valid, but what was her end game? He assumed it wasn’t book research.
“You never answered me before when I asked - you don’t believe Danver killed his friends, do you? You think one of those things killed them!”
Katie lifted her head and met his angry gaze with a calm demeanor. “I thought it was a distinct possibility, but I wasn’t sure. How could I be?”
“How could you not share that with us? ‘Oh, by the way, you might be killed by a goddamn black ghost!’” Bryan said, waving his arms around.
“Dude, don’t give yourself a hernia, we’re OK,” Kyle said.
“Would you have believed me if I had told you I thought a spirit had murdered an entire party of people?” She looked over all of them as she spoke. “Any of you?”
Bryan closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. She had a point. Kyle was the only person, other than herself, that had been open to the idea of the paranormal. Had she spoken up about her theories before, they would have laughed in her face and then gone into the church anyway.
“Actually, he does have a point,” Ben said, nodding at Bryan. “If that thing could throw the chair out of the way, couldn’t it hurt us as well?”
That got everyone’s attention and they all turned to Katie, waiting for her answer.
“You have to understand, everything I’ve been working on is all guesswork on my part,” she said.
“You didn’t answer his question. Can that thing attack us? Is that what killed Danver’s people?” Creepy Joey asked, staring at her with his large, disturbing eyes.
“If I had to guess, I would say yes. But we should be safe for now. Everything I’ve read so far has indicated that the area shouldn’t become fully permeable until later in the night.”
“Fully permeable? Speak English, Katie!” Kyle said.
“Remember when I explained that this area becomes ‘thin’ once every forty years? I’m saying that whatever we just witnessed in the library hasn’t been able to fully enter our world yet.”
Bryan couldn’t believe the conversation he was a part of. Two hours ago he lived in a solid, no frills world, but now he felt like he had lost his mind. His brain felt like a spike had been driven into it.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting the hell out of here. If something we can’t see can actually kill us, then why are we standing around and discussing it?” Bryan asked.
Then the lights went out.